The Drowned Detective
Neil Jordan
[Bloomsbury]
Film director Neil Jordan first came to people’s attention in the late ’70s when his short story collection Night in Tunisia won the Guardian Fiction Prize. Since then he’s become better known directing big-budget movies like Michael Collins, yet has still managed to squeeze five novels in between film projects. His 2011 gothic novel Mistaken played with the theme of the double. This new release, The Drowned Detective, is another genre exercise, this time taking various crime tropes and introducing supernatural elements.
The protagonist Jonathan is a British private investigator based in an unknown eastern European city with his wife and daughter, who is tailing a government minister on a secret assignation. The resulting scandal and toppling of the government plays out in the background: Jonathan hardly seems to notice clashes between Pussy Riot-style civilians and police. Heavy on his mind instead is a missing daughter case from 20 years ago, a mysterious woman whose life he saves from drowning, and the breakdown of his marriage. Jonathan enlists the help of a psychic named Gertrude in his search. Jordan continually draws attention to Gertrude’s likeness to a faded screen idol: “She looked like an ageing Marlene Dietrich and she knew it.” But it’s Gertrude who connects the noir properties to the modern day: she smokes from an e-cigarette, and admits to being “an analogue kind of girl” when the missing girl’s whereabouts are requested on Google Maps.
Jordan’s films often reflect these tropes: the neo-noir setting is reminiscent of Mona Lisa, the strained marriage and adultery brings to mind The End of the Affair, and the gothic/horror subject matter echoes Interview with a Vampire. Yet perhaps unorthodox sex is the theme audiences most associate with Jordan. The Drowned Detective is no different, with the repeated sexual encounters between a main character and a ghost. Jordan manages to pull something off in book form that is standard in his film scripts: a sense of genuine surprise. The reader is constantly left guessing in this puzzling and anomalous novel.
Words: Eoin Tierney
